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Opening Up To Indie Authors Campaign

ALLi is running an ongoing campaign to encourage and aid literary events, festivals, prizes, reviewers, booksellers and other interested parties to find ways to include self-publishing authors in their programs, events, listings and reviews. There are four main parts to the campaign:

Dan Holloway, indie author, performance poet and Open Up To Indies campaigner

Compiled by Dan Holloway and Debbie Young, our blog editor, Opening Up To Indie Authors: A Guidebook, offers an assessment of the opportunities for book industry people, including libraries, to work together with indie authors. The guide also offers a basic outline of some best practices and etiquette for both indie authors and their potential partners. ALLi Members are eligible to receive a free digital copy, and both paperback and digital editions can be found in our shop.

Email Campaign
We are gathering a team of volunteers to help in an email campaign to selected partners worldwide. You can also help to highlight those institutions and organisations who are making a difference, in an initiative we call Name-And-Gain.

Debbie Young, editor of ALLi’s blog of self-publishing advice and Open Up To Indies campaigner

Information Gathering
We’d also like you to take a moment to tell us anything relevant to the campaign in the comments too — commendations for those who are doing well, recommendations to those who could do better — let us have yours in the comment box below.

Petition
We are seeking signatures for a petition, which we will launch in tandem with the book, to which you can add your name right now (and pass on to your indie author friends, supporters and fans.)

Thank you for whatever support you are able to offer.

One Response to Opening Up To Indie Authors Campaign

At this year’s CrimeFest in Bristol I attended a thriller panel talk sponsored by the ITW and at which the down-to-earth Lee Child extolled the benefits of joining and directed each and every delegate to sign up via a paper form provided after the event. He said anyone could join, for free, whether traditionally published or not and that ITW were keen to open up free membership to independents and ‘were working hard to change the language on the website.’

Unfortunately, there weren’t enough of these forms to go round and I was therefore directed to sign up via ITW’s website instead. I attempted to do this, circumnavigating their online questions as best I could and have received a Sisyphean and gatekeepery form ‘especially for self-published authors.’ Lucky me. It seems there are many hoops of worthiness to be jumped through. A suggestion of a minimum of three books published, sales figures to date, marketing strategies, a detailed and thorough daily food diary for every Amazon executive born from 1950 onwards and so on, all of which is then to be presented before a board for approval. While I fully appreciate ITW may have any criteria for membership to their organisation they so choose, my experience has been at such odds to the way it was presented to delegates at the convention that it is genuinely confusing.

I wondered if you might be able to find out any information about the simple sign up and type of membership Lee Child talked of and which was available in paper form at the CrimeFest event from any ALLi members who attended because this whole thing stinks. To have an ITW sponsored presentation claiming free membership is open to all (whether indie or not) for not much more than a name and an email and then finding out the reality is the complete opposite makes me wonder a) what they are going to do with the data they collected, b) why corners of the same organisation are so at odds with another, and c) when organisations such as this are going to wake up to the fact that there are more talented authors writing than there are publishers to bring them to market and that this digital thingymajiggy might amount to something after all!